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splitting vacations
Saturday, November 20 2010
This morning I raised up the homebrew solar panel to its normal orientation (slightly less than fifty degrees above horizontal and pointing south-south west). Just before I did that, I replaced all of the steel clips holding the glass from the bottom with PVC clips. Ideally, I would have been able to find clips of the correct shape, but I ended up having to saw PVC gutter supports in half and then use sections of PVC pipes as standoffs to attach them to the bottom of the panel. None of this will mean anything unless you consult the following diagram:
The old-style steel clip used to secure panes of glass. I'd coated these in epoxy, which crumbled away after three years of exposure to UV radiation.
The new-style PVC clips with PVC pipe standoffs. The idea with these clips is to ensure the glass doesn't slide off the panel while not getting in the way of rainwater and other things that need to slide off the glass.
I took this picture the other day and it's kind of cute. From left: Eleanor, Marie (aka "the Baby"), Nigel the cat, and Gretchen.
At various times today I took relaxing mini-vacations at the pile of Silver Maple. Though it's good solid exercise, there's something very soothing and automatic about splitting wood. It sucks you in and keeps you doing more than you initially intended.
Most of the light bulbs throughout the house have been replaced with CF bulbs for years. In some places I've also used LED bulbs (including in the refrigerator, the bedside reading lamps, and in a couple of the recessed ceiling cans in kitchen). I've long been daunted by the 12 volt halogen bulbs that supply most of the living room light, though recently I discovered that there are LED replacements at the Home Depot. When one of these worked well, I bought one to replace the other. Unfortunately, though, in the second socket the LED tended to flicker annoyingly. According to something I found via Google, this flickering was a consequence of the solid state voltage conversion circuit expecting a bigger load than the LED bulb could provide. It was a four watt set of LEDs replacing a 35 watt halogen bulb. So I decided to decommission one the 12 volt DC lamps and hack the other to accept two LED bulbs. This hack required soldering and the use of polystyrene model glue, but it worked. Now, instead of having two bulbs shining about ten feet apart, there are two bulbs about two inches apart. Since they throw light in a highly-directional manner, it hardly matters where they are physically.
There weren't many shows for me to watch in the DVR, so I ended up watching the first half of a Bittorrent download instead: the classic 1970s disaster movie entitled The Towering Inferno. Though the acting was wooden and the sentiments deeply dated, it satisfied the same geeky technological dystopian hunger that The China Syndrome had fed a week or two before.
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